FROM APRIL 2020 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

If life is a sandwich of routine and duty, sport is its grape jelly. It’s our dream bubble, our fantasy lair, a swimming pool surrounded by concrete. Going under, we hold our breath for as long as we can.

Until this month, I’d always seen sport as that boundless place of liberty and freedom where, on hockey nights, I bucket my head into a helmet, snap garters to socks – feeling as much Lili St. Cyr as Paul Cyr – and haul on mascot-hipped pants, pretending I’m someone I’m not, and someone different every time. On the bench: no phone, no texts, no Emergency Warning notices that the Pickering nuclear plant has been compromised. It’s just someone who looks like me, only not quite, sitting beside my beautiful and longstanding teammates with whom I am both deeply intimate, and deeply distant – “Hey, what’s Chizzler’s job, exactly?” – adding my voice to an in-game rococo of taunts and digs on a cold, disgusting bench.

And yet, if I’ve learned anything about sport in these virus times, it isn’t so much that I’ve missed playing the games because of how they release me from my life, but rather, because of how they order it. Monday: George Bell, evenings. Thursday: George Bell, mornings. Saturday/Sunday: McCormick. Also: Raptors/Leafs Tuesdays and Thursdays (usually) and Sunday afternoons, and, in the summertime, the Jays every day at 7 p.m. Sport – playing it, watching it – gives my life, an artist’s life, a kind of schedule, each date an arrondissement in otherwise unmapped terrain, where work comes in bursts, and inspiration can strike when it wants to, and sometimes almost never. Sports has been my ballast, my centre of gravity. From a freelancer’s view, it’s the nearest thing to shape that one has in a job where you spin here, there, wherever you have to go.

As the marauding power of COVID-19 strengthened, some local arenas stayed open. Even before the March Break week, a few of us were planning an open skate for people whose families weren’t going away; but no emails were needed to cancel the skate once the situation worsened. A few nights into the shutdown, a friend texted me a shot of the Wallace Emerson rink, where he and his kids, and a few others, had jumped the fence, sticking his tongue out at authorities who had closed the rinks and rec centres. But in the moments before writing him back, that gesture – the benevolent gesture of play – suddenly seemed irresponsible, dangerous and wrong. Our skates were bagged, our pucks stilled. A few kids play basketball near the playground where we live; a fellow with an Irish hurl whacks a sliotar against the brick. I take the long way around them.

Before the virus, I’d get up in the morning and face what everyone faces – kids, work, bills – knowing that a myriad of forces and changes could find me that day. But no matter what happened, I let my imagination travel through to how the day would reliably end: sitting exhausted in my underwear wondering what Geoff or Jasime or that guy with the old duct-taped shin pads did for a living, but not caring that I didn’t know. In sport, the mood is open, free. The spirit dances the same every time. It’s formulaic and good and because of it we are able to do everything else, or at least try.

Life makes itself up as it goes along. The last three times our rotary phone rang, it was to tell me that my dad had suffered a fatal heart attack, and that Neil Peart had died (the other time was from a friend at a police station). With one kid ending high school and another beginning university, it’s hard not to spend hours lost in fortune’s guessing game, wondering how the hell it all turns out. Next thing you know, an item on the news tells you about a virus from faraway that has travelled to another country, then another, and another, and then it’s here: no more Monday night, George Bell. No more Saturday, McCormick. How could you miss that puck? Were your skates tied together? What’s that terrible smell? Are we going out for beers?

For now, we are not.